HAYWARD — In an interview at the Jahan Malika Girls High School in Ghazni, Afghanistan, someone asked Azizgul, a woman in her 40s, why she wanted to enroll in a literacy class at this point in her life.

Her answer: “If you can’t read, you’re blind.”

The widowed mother of six must walk about an hour to get to her new reading and writing course, which began at the crowded high school last month.

She makes the trek because the class, sponsored by a group of Hayward-area volunteers and donors, is the only program offering education for adult women in her small Afghan city.

“The women in the program were so happy,” said Rahima Haya, a retired Hayward schoolteacher who traveled to Ghazni to launch the Bay Area-funded adult literacy project last month. “They were eager to learn.”

The class is the product of a unique and budding collaboration between community leaders in Hayward and Ghazni.

Last year at the Kabul Restaurant on Hesperian Boulevard, organizers of the Hayward-Ghazni Sister City Formation Committee raised several thousands of dollars to jump-start the class.

They had planned on stretching $3,000 out to teach 50 adult women for one semester.

They ended up getting two teachers when they thought they could only afford one, said Carol Ruth Silver, a former San Francisco county supervisor and civil rights activist who joined Haya on last month’s Ghazni trip.

The women brought with them books about Hayward, school supplies and a mayor-to-mayor letter from Hayward Mayor Roberta Cooper.

They established contacts with Ghazni’s provincial governor, city mayor and provincial minister of education.

Silver said the governor, Haji Sher Alam Ibrahimi, a “large, burly, older man who has a very commanding presence,” insisted on hiring armed security guards to protect the Bay Area women on their trip.

“The people were friendly and charming and hospitable, and although we were at all times followed by four guys with submachine guns, we felt perfectly safe,” Silver said. “We were probably about as safe as we would have been in many parts of the East Bay.”

Haya, who left Afghanistan with her family decades ago and moved to the U.S. in 1983, said she was surprised by the stark differences between Ghazni and the country’s busy capital, Kabul, which lies several dozen miles to the north.

“I didn’t see many women on the streets,” Haya said. “My first reaction was that in Kabul, they are more free. In Ghazni, the principal, the students, all the women wear burqas.”

And while they found the school system improving in Ghazni city, despite lack of space and resources, they said schools in the greater Ghazni province have faced difficulties. Some rural schools in Afghanistan have been torched, and educators attacked and killed.

Farther to the south, in the Helmand and Kandahar provinces, the Taliban, which had banned girls’ education when it was in power from 1996 until 2001, is in resurgence.

The Bay Area women said locals in Ghazni welcomed their program, volunteering space, books and supplies. One shopkeeper asked them to start a similar program in a mountain village on the outskirts of Ghazni province, but Silver said it is not yet safe enough for them to do so. She said she is working on another program that would supply classes by video conference to schools across the region.

The Ghazni women who enrolled in the new Hayward-sponsored literacy program all speak Dari — a cousin to the Persian Farsi — but, mostly, were never taught to read and write.

Organizers hope to launch a similar class for women who speak Pashto, another widely spoken Afghan language.

“With the small budget we have, we’re able to continue this for four years,” Haya said. “A lot of people think we should have a lot of money — a million dollars — to start something. But what they don’t realize is you don’t need a lot of money to start something.”

More in News

Around 8:20 p.m., a 50-year-old Oakland man was driving on eastbound I-580 lanes near Edwards Avenue when a bullet came through his windshield from an unknown direction, CHP Officer Matthew Hamer said.

Around 5:35 p.m., CHP officers responded to a report of the incident in westbound I-580 lanes at Main Street. En route, officers learned a vehicle's driver said a person in another vehicle brandished a handgun and fired a shot.

In addition to evacuating 10 neighboring homes, deputies restricted pedestrian and vehicle traffic in the area while the sheriff's office bomb squad "safely disposed" of the explosives, officials said.